Girl Talk All Day

There are a multitude of artists better than Girl Talk. Others are more original, more musically proficient or more thoughtful. But no one is more fun, and no one delivers pure, unfiltered musical joy better than Greg Gillis. He creates seventy minute long parties, picking out the best thirty seconds of everything under the sun.

Mash-ups are nothing new and nothing rare. What sets Gillis apart is his ability to create absolutely seamless creations, cramming twenty or more tracks into a single song. While others may noticeably (and sometimes annoyingly) shift the tempos of songs or chop them up, Gillis rarely does. The times that it is chopped up or adjusted it’s barely noticeable or it adds to the song. It’s never used lazily or as a shortcut. This man does not cut corners.

All Day is Girl Talk’s cleanest album in that sense. Pitch disagreements are virtually non-existent, and save for one ill-advised Creep mash-up, it’s as close to perfect as he can possibly get. The quality of his albums is remarkably consistent, and this does nothing to break that up. It’s a solid, fun album through and through, and the highs he occasionally reaches are still dizzying. There’s nothing on here to match the now infamous Biggie vs. Elton moment on 2006’s Night Ripper, but the attempts at reaching that again are fun to hear. The Portishead and Big Boi mash on Jump on Stage is a fine moment, as is the Party in the USA and The Next Episode combo on the preceding track. Excellent sections are in no short supply.

My only complaint with the album is its length. There are definitely sections that could have been cut, and its seventy one minute running time is a bit much. But it’s right on par with his other highly entertaining releases and it keeps their joyful tone intact. It’s definitely nothing new for the genre or Gillis himself, except an improvement in technical ability. The album is incredibly smoothly constructed, and as I said before, the songs almost never disagree or sound messy.

I’m sure I’ll hear a lot from this album in the coming months, and at that point it will have done exactly what it set out to do. The more parties this gets played at and the more of those people go dance at his ridiculously fun live show, the more meaningful the album will become. He manufactures nostalgia, which is a wonderful thing to do.